Thursday, July 19, 2007

A trip to the dentist

I went to see my new lady dentist this week (the old one, the one I’ve been with for 30 years dropped dead 2 weeks ago).

She seems nice and professional – and best of all she has a rock steady hand, (my old one had a tendency to twitch, but not any more, if you see what I mean). Anyway, she did a filling and then a scale and polish – which I found unbearable. It’s when the little polishing brush catches your gum – it’s so damn tickly, I could hardly control myself...

Anyway, after the torture of the polish she took an x-ray of a tooth in my lower right jaw. "I just want to take an x-ray of this tuth – it doesn’t look right"…

"A ‘tuth’, you’re taking an x-ray of a tuth?"

"Yes, this tuth here"….

With that, she shoved a big sort of picture frame into my mouth, and lowered what looked like Flash Gordon’s flash death-ray gun down from the ceiling.

"Now just relax, there’s nothing to worry about" she said, as she legged it out of the room and pressed the button.

Ten minutes later and I’m looking at a lightbox with a little bit of film on it. My tuth is there in all its gory glory.

"Ahhh, thought so"

"What, what’s up then?"

She got out her special pointy stick.

"This tuth - do you see this, and that, and this"…..

I nodded in all the right places, cracking on I understood what the hell she was talking about. She blah-blahed away until she came to the end of her medical diagnosis, and the only bit of the conversation I understood…… "And to fix your tuth will cost around £600"..

£600! The slap on the floor was the sound of my jaw hitting the deck.

A straw pole at Alfie HQ rendered a fairly sympathetic response from the crew – that was, until I mentioned the cost.

"Six 'kin hundred 'kin quid........ Are you 'kin 'kin mad?" Last time I saw Mrs A, she was rummaging around the toolbox apparently looking for a hammer and a chisel……..

Sounds like a good dentist to me. Mine started double root canal treatment, got halfway through and said she couldn't do any more. I was told to go private (£1,000-£1,200) or wait for the NHS dental hospital.